I think there is a disconnect here. I am aware of how FICO uses algorithms to compute a score from a borrowers profile. In fact, if any of you have used certain popular PC anti-virus software, I was the lead engineer in creating a similar type of computation, where I would compute a risk score for a potentially-malicious executable based on various observations of what the EXE was doing (opening 100 Internet connections per second/scanning person data/etc.)
Your restaurant example is a very good one. It would be quite applicable to the current disussion if the salmon provided by the restaurant were free, once per month. Then, the food service company would play a game. They would provide the salmon to the restaurant for free, but the restaurant would never know on what particular day the salmon would arrive. Nor would the consumer. To kick things off, the food service company would make the salmon available every 4th, 5th, or 6th or the month, typically the 5th. Then, many customers would show-up at restaurant on the 5th every month for few months, and feast on salmon. The food service company would insist, as part of providing free salmon, that the restaurant keep track of how many times people call the restaurant asking, "Is today free salmon day". Then, when food service company notices and enormous spike in such calls, the food service company will withold the salmon and jack-up the retail price. Days go by . 7th. 8th. 9th. 10th. 11th! After while, a certain percentage of people will say:
This is ridiculous! I was hoping to each salmon on the 4th. And here we are the 11th. And it is still not here! Why am I even waiting? I can just buy the salmon.
And that's the point. The whole point of this strategy is to induce into the customer an expectation followed by frustation so that they purchase something that they have grown accustomed to receiving for free at semi-predictable instants. This would explain why FICO varies the day of revelation of the FREE FICO score. For this scheme to work, the variation has to be part of the game. When FICO detects that the customer (fish) cannot be hooked this month (pun intended), they will reveal the FICO score early in the month, to get customer hooked to a date around the beginning of the month. Then, when FICO detects customer desperation, they yank. Yanking, in this case, would let day after day go by, until the customer becomes so frustrated by unmet expectation, s/he calls the toll-free # at FICO, to pay for score.
